Drake leaves UCI legacy

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IRVINE Michael V. Drake, UC Irvine's chancellor for nine years, will leave behind a university with expanded academic offerings, new research facilities, and more campus initiatives targeting diversity and inclusion when he departs for Ohio State University in June.

Drake, 63, an ophthalmologist, was hired Thursday to take the reins of Ohio's flagship public university, a storied, 144-year-old research institution in the capital city of Columbus.

Ohio State boasts a Division I champion football team and has the third-largest undergraduate population of any U.S. public college.

Drake, a career University of California faculty member and administrator, said he and his wife, Brenda, have “decidedly mixed emotions” about the upcoming move.

“The opportunity to begin a new adventure at the Ohio State University is compelling and unique, but the requirement that we leave home and family to do so is formidable,” Drake said in a statement Thursday. “Brenda and I are proud of the tremendous progress our campus has made, even as we all endured the hardships of the recession.”

Former UC President Robert C. Dynes, a friend of Drake's who appointed him to helm the Orange County campus in 2005, said Drake stayed as long as he did because of his love for the UC system.

Drake earned his medical degree from UC San Francisco and was a longtime faculty member and administrator there.

“I knew that Michael had looked at other opportunities, but he maintained his allegiance to UC and UC Irvine,” said Dynes, now a professor emeritus of physics at UC San Diego. “What I saw in him was a clear thinker, a calm person, who expressed himself very clearly.”

Drake told Ohio State trustees Thursday that the university was “in many ways the premier position in higher education in the United States today.”

Ohio State has twice as many students as UC Irvine, and the university is in the middle of building a $1 billion cancer hospital, the largest project in its history.

“The trajectory and power of Ohio State are known throughout the world,” Drake told Ohio State trustees.

Drake's salary is still being negotiated; he earned $401,116 in 2012.

Retired Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee, who served for 14 years in two stints, earned nearly $2 million in 2011.

During Drake's tenure, UC Irvine added more than 5 million square feet of new teaching and research space, including the 500,000-square-foot UC Irvine Douglas Hospital in Orange.

Drake also oversaw the opening of the first new public law school in California in four decades, and launched programs in public health, pharmaceutical sciences and nursing science.

UC Irvine student Matine Azadian, winner of a national research award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, described Drake as a personal mentor and the reason Azadian is pursuing a career in academic medicine.

“It's a huge loss for UCI,” said Azadian, 19, an anthropology major.

A champion of campus diversity and inclusion, Drake last year received an O.C. Human Relations award for promoting free speech and intellectual diversity.

He's credited with bringing to UC Irvine, among other things, a Latino medical training program, faculty diversity workshops, gender-neutral restrooms, and a campus group that seeks to calm tensions between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian activists on campus.

UC Irvine spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon said Drake was not available for an interview Thursday.

While Drake's accomplishments run deep, his tenure also has been marked by major challenges in an era when tuition at all UC campuses more than doubled.

In 2007, Drake fired and then immediately rehired UC Irvine's founding law school dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, in a highly publicized incident that sparked accusations of political meddling.

Chemerinsky said Thursday he was “heartbroken” about Drake's departure, describing the chancellor as the biggest early champion of UC Irvine's law school, which opened in 2009.

“The past is ancient history,” said Chemerinsky, who is teaching a freshman seminar course with Drake this term focusing on the civil rights movement. “I would not have accepted the offer when it was re-extended if I didn't respect and adore him so much.”

In 2010, Drake inflamed campus tensions with UC Irvine's Muslim community when he strongly condemned the actions of 11 students who disrupted a campus speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren.

The students, who said they were exercising their free-speech rights, were criminally prosecuted, and the university sanctioned the campus Muslim Student Union.

“A lot of students were frustrated that he wasn't listening or that he would hear them but wouldn't really listen,” said Nicole Hisatomi, 21, a fourth-year political science and public health policy major. “When it came to student activism and protest, there was a general feeling he wanted everything to be quieted down.”

Less than six months after Drake arrived at UCI, the hospital's liver transplant program closed after a federal investigation found patients died while waiting for livers the hospital received but hadn't transplanted.

And last year, UCI paid $1.2 million to settle allegations that anesthesiologists falsified records used to bill Medicare; those allegations also had been cited in a 2008 Medicare investigation.

“His innate intelligence and knowledge of the field has made it so helpful to talk about issues that we have and to brainstorm a clear plan out of that,” Belmont said. “He's very strategic in his thinking.”

Before serving as UC Irvine's chancellor, Drake worked for five years as the UC system's vice president for health affairs.

Dyne, the former UC president, said he put Drake into the Irvine chancellorship in part because he knew Drake could lend his expertise to UCI Medical Center. In the 1990s, before Drake's arrival, the medical center was roiled by revelations that doctors were stealing egg cells and embryos from patients and giving them to other women.

“Michael came into Irvine with his wheels turning already,” Dyne said. “UCI was coming off a really bad time. He stabilized and built it into a highly respected health sciences and school of medicine.”

Drake is likely to confront an even more complex university in Ohio State, said John Aubrey Douglass, who studies higher education issues at UC Berkeley.

Unlike at UC, where one board of UC Regents governs the entire system, Drake will be directly accountable to a 19-member board of trustees at Ohio State – and also will work closely with Ohio lawmakers.

“He's going to have a more direct relationship with lawmakers in promoting the budget and resources,” said Douglass, a senior research fellow at UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education.

“He will also have to deal with an athletic program of tremendous size and complexity. That will be a big difference.”

Ohio State's sports teams, led by its seven-time national-champion football team, generate about nine times as much athletic revenue as UC Irvine's teams.

Jacob Levin, UC Irvine's assistant vice chancellor for research development, said Thursday he saw Drake last week as Drake addressed a small delegation of international scientists.

“As always, he was warm, affable and beaming with pride about UCI and our recent accomplishments,” Levin recalled.

“I am sure these and his other presidential qualities will transfer well to Ohio State. Plus, now he'll have a football team to rally for.”

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